26 - What if I can’t find the InDesign file - can I open the PDF?

Okay, let's say we can't find the InDesign file, we only have the PDF. Can we open up the PDF in InDesign, and start editing it? No, it's not possible, you can place it, and it will stick it in like an image, but you can't adjust it. The way to adjust it is that hopefully you're a Creative Cloud subscriber and you've got something called Acrobat Pro or Acrobat DC. If you don't have that installed, go and do that. On my Mac here, there's a little icon, 'Apps'. Mine's called Acrobat DC, that's the current version of it. And if yours is not installed, install it. On a PC, I think the same icon is in the bottom right. And what you want to do is, find your PDF, download it from your email, or wherever you've got it, right click it, and say 'Open With', and make sure it goes into 'Adobe Acrobat'.

Now, because this is the Pro version, and the paid version, mine's called Acrobat Pro DC. If yours is Acrobat Reader it's not going to do any of this. But because you're a Creative Cloud license user, it's going to work, and what we're going to do, over here on the right is one called 'Edit PDF'. Now, don't get your hopes up too much, you can do additions, you can add images, but can't start swapping around and using it like InDesign. It's very, very cave men.

Now I'm going to make sure I'm on 'Edit'. Along the top here, let's say our address has changed, I can change it to '100'. It's really slow, and clunky, and jumpy. So I can do that, no problem. I'm going to scroll down a little bit. And you can see here, let's say I just need to change this, so it's just a typo or price change. Jumpy, jumpy, that's okay. So you can do basic stuff in here. Basic formatting, you can add images, add text. Add text, click and drag out a box. I'm still waiting for this to catch back up. Mine's a pretty hard core Mac, and it's a little bit-- hey, here it is, it's back.

So that's kind of last ditch, you just want to make some basic amends, and you don't have the InDesign files, you can do it here in Acrobat Pro. Now we've done it in Acrobat Pro. This method works in Illustrator often as well. Illustrator has some pros and cons to it. A little bit harder to use Illustrator if you've never used it before, but there's a little bit more formatting and layout changes you can do, so try either this one, this is the easy version, or Adobe Illustrator, and open your PDF in there, and make changes.

All right, that's it for this video. I hope that's helped. Let's get into the next tutorial.